Community Art An Anthropological Perspective

Exploring key issues for the anthropology of art and art theory, this fascinating text provides the first in-depth study of community art from an anthropological perspective. The book focuses on the thirty-five year history of the Free Form Arts Trust, an arts group that played a major part in the 1970s struggle to carve out a space for community arts in Britain. Turning their back on the world of gallery art, the fine artist founders of Free Form were determined to use their visual expertise to connect, through collaborative art projects, with the working-class people excluded by the established art world. In seeking to give the residents of poor communities a greater role in shaping their built environment, the artists' aesthetic practice would be transformed. Community Artexamines this experiment in reimagining the place of the artist in the making of art, with its rejection of the individualised practice of the gallery artist. An experiment that challenges common understandings of the categories of 'art', 'expertise', and 'community', it gives the Free Form story a relevance far wider than just that of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Britain.

Kate Crehan is Professor of Anthropology, College of Staten Island and Graduate Center, City University of New York.